


The Love That Loves Not Me

by formerlydf



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Background Relationships, Character Study, F/F, Fix-It, Post-Series, a death that isn't a death, a great deal of salt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:58:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8882608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerlydf/pseuds/formerlydf
Summary: Marthe is dead. Life, somehow, continues from there.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spoilers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoilers/gifts).



> Thanks to the people who got me into this life-destroying series, and to Oliviacirce for being utterly delighted when I asked, "Wait, this might be a weird question but do you know _anything_ about 16th century Scottish burial customs?"

Marthe was dead: to begin with.

Two short, sharp sounds in quick succession, shot by a young man with an overabundance of folly and a scarcity of sense, and some three decades of existence had bled out with significantly less labor than they had begun, with just as much choice in the matter on her part.

Death had, in the end, proved to be just as tediously and infuriatingly inevitable as living.

There was a scream: the indomitable Philippa. Another sharp shot: the death of the fool. Marthe, upon reflection, decided she felt no sympathy. She had little enough for those who deserved it. Austin Grey had been wound up from so many directions she scarcely knew who had set the first baited hook, but he at least had been given all life’s advantages, including good counsel, and he had made his own choices. Some people were not meant to live to wisdom. And besides, he had shot her.

Austin’s soul fled his body in search of some questionable afterlife, but Marthe’s lingered, staring up at the sky through eyes that could no longer see. Her brother’s family mourned in harsh sobs and solemn silences, until hoofbeats sounded and they realised who she was not.

Marthe had understood from the moment she saw that well-dressed figure raise his gun. Amid the grand workings of the Dame de Doubtance, her grandmother’s final cruelty: even Marthe’s death could not be her own.

Francis Crawford of Lymond, native son of Scotland, former outlaw, hero of France, friend to Queen Elizabeth of England, former lover of Tsar Ivan, filicide, her brother, touched his feet to the ground. He spared a glance for Marthe and Austin, lingering longer on the tear tracks on Philippa’s face, comprehending the entire circumstance in a single instant.

He said, “Philippa?” and for long moments there was only joy.

-

Francis Crawford of Lymond reunited with his mother, his brother, his friends, and his beloved. Jerott arranged for Marthe’s body to be taken back to Scotland for burial.

-

Marthe had neither inherited nor been taught the secrets behind her grandmother’s talents. Looking at the stars, she had only ever seen lights in the night sky, not fates that could be interpreted or rearranged by the canny. 

In death, however, even through the roof of the building that housed her body, the stars shone clearer. For the first time, she saw the river of her life twining darkly between them, point to cold, bright point. 

Point: Beatris died, after a life ruled by her mother and two children fathered by a man who remembered very little and did not love her quite enough. She died and her son followed a scant two years later, and her mother shrugged her shoulders and tried again.

Point: Camille de Doubtance had little interest in raising a second girl. The nuns fed Marthe, clothed her, taught her to read and do sums and speak clearly. The ancient woman with the old-fashioned wig and the strong grip was always close enough to turn one eerie, shrewd eye over Marthe’s progress in studies and life, but never close enough to give comfort, or for Marthe to ask for it. Always close enough for Marthe to suspect her of being some relation, but never close enough to expect her to claim it. 

Most of the children at the abbey were older — nice, mannered girls of twelve to sixteen with fathers and mothers and inheritances, their tidy gowns and cheerful voices lingering on the edges of Marthe’s awareness. She never knew them well.

Point: There was a time, when she was very young, that Marthe thought perhaps she could do anything. In her quiet rooms, around piles of books snuck off the convent shelves, she fenced with twigs against opponents just a shade too slow and bested opponents considered unbeatable. Invisible audiences gathered to exclaim over her great deeds and magnificent achievements, while the kings and queens of vague, distant countries debated how best to show her favor.

She dressed in men’s clothes to join Jeanne d’Arc at war, and saved her from death at the hands of those who feared and hated her. She ran away with Silence to seek adventure and knowledge and music, and outwitted the meddlesome Nature and Nurture; with them on her side, Silence would never have to choose between being Silentius and Silentia, and would never be expected to marry a king older than her father. Taking the place of Lanval, she fell in love with a radiant fairy lady of whom she could not speak, and when a lord who did not appreciate her put her on trial, her lover came to rescue her and brought her to live forever in Avalon.

This was when she was young, before the Dame de Doubtance paid her much mind. She learned very quickly the ends of all stories.

Point: The brother she would never meet haunted her footsteps like a shadow; the brother she could never escape blazed over her head like a sun.

Point: The more she had seen of the world, the less she had questioned the idea that otherworldly forces could predict fates and rearrange lives to make them come to pass. The powerful always held the fate of the weak in their hands. Why should gods or astronomy be any different?

Point: Marthe first met Kiaya Khatoun in the house of the Dame de Doubtance. Marthe had only just returned from a journey with Gaultier; Kiaya Khatoun had come to visit, as she often did. Kiaya Khatoun and the Dame de Doubtance understood each other very well.

Marthe had not known that at the time. Güzel had spoken to her of music and lands she had not yet seen, as if she did not mind that Marthe was an orphan, a bastard, a woman, and only twenty years of age besides. She listened to Marthe with interest and attention, and debated with her as if she genuinely cared what Marthe thought. She never planned to marry, and traveled when and where she wished it. She was at least as clever as Marthe, and in some circumstances much cleverer; the few times they pulled out a chessboard, Marthe always lost resoundingly, boxed in by a long game she had never anticipated.

Of course Marthe fell in love. She had fortified her defenses for anything but this.

Point: And more fool Marthe, for letting what softer emotions she still had hold sway over iron-clad reason. Sharing a bed was not a promise. Like the Dame de Doubtance, Kiaya Khatoun believed in fate and power, and used every tool she possessed to achieve what she willed. A thing like kisses and sentiment would not offer her even momentary hesitation. Marthe had always known this. A kiss with Marthe was not worth as much as a kiss with Dragut or a moment as mistress of the harem; it was easy to obtain and offered little benefit beyond the moment.

She had never known why Güzel continued to return. She had asked twice, once in anger and once in weariness, and Güzel had deftly evaded the question as Francis and his pet pirate might evade hostile ships in the night.

Point: Marthe had always been beautiful. A beautiful girl of no name can learn a vast amount about the world, provided that she has a thick enough skin and a strong enough stomach.

Point: She had not wanted to step foot on that ship.

Point: Philippa had once offered to rescue her, not because she looked like her brother but simply because she needed help. Marthe had been silent for a long moment, wondering at the girl who would consign herself to a harem for the sake of a strange child, who would offer to rescue a woman she hardly seemed to like. 

“People help one another,” Philippa said and seemed to believe it, not just as idealism but as purpose. Marthe had never understood the Somervilles; but neither did she understand how the world entirely deserved them. 

Point: “I have no more than you have,” Francis said.

And Marthe could not tell, in that instant, if he meant it. He said the words so sincerely, with open eyes and yielding hands, and yet Francis was the cleverest man she knew; too clever, surely, to make a comment so facile, when the story they were all telling was his.

Marthe said, “My dear, you have all the Dame de Doubtance’s fortune”: the fortune she had foreseen for him, the one she had schemed to create. He had the fortune and the future Güzel saw in him, and the untold fortune of Güzel herself choosing to be in his house and in his bed. He had the fortune of devoted friends, a brother who loved him, a mother who fought for him, and a clever, compassionate, beautiful wife. He had the whole world turned into supporting players. All this, and he wished to kill himself in Russia.

“He offered you it all, and you refused it,” Jerott rebuked. Marthe laughed, because how foolish that was, in a way only Jerott could be: if anyone had offered her even a portion of what Francis had been given, she could not have refused in a thousand years.

It had to be given. The thief’s hand closed only on poisoned thorns.

Point: Where had kingmaking gotten Kiaya Khatoun? Where had fate gotten her? Where had Francis gotten her? Dead, in Russia, out of choices and cards to play after spending her life on other people’s futures. What was it about the people Marthe loved, that they found it so appealing to die in the snow?

Point: Nostradamus said, “My part in the prophecy is fulfilled. Yours has still to come. Whatever made you think you were free?”

Prophets were truly unbearable. Death had freed her from their company, at least. 

-

She did not need to linger with her body, if she did not wish. She could abandon it to Jerott and his care and concern, fleeing back to Flaw Valleys to see what her beloved brother was doing after her tragic death.

Fucking, mostly. And constantly.

Between them, she suspected, it was a work of grand epics, of love poetry rewritten in the journey of their bodies, of humor and impossible understanding and musica universalis, humming the notes of the harmony of the spheres themselves. There were words like “felicity,” and “exquisite,” and “deluge.”

From the outside, it was two well-formed, unclothed bodies flung across a bed, making all the typical undignified noises and hot breaths one would expect of two people enjoying such an act, without modesty or reserve. Love as observed rather than experienced always lost something in translation. Marthe followed the example of the rest of Flaw Valleys, and left them to each other.

 _I preferred love to wedlock, freedom to a bond._ Marthe had read Héloïse’s letters and had loved her for it, for her deep feelings and recountings of her attempts to dissuade Abelard from marriage. She had not imagined a bond that could be freedom, a marriage that could go beyond concupiscence and wealth and contracts, “that a perfect love should preserve their bond of matrimony unbroken, not so much by the continence of their bodies as by the purity of their hearts.” 

For when ye have understood this, that there is not a better man nor a happier woman on the face of the earth...

Such happiness, she supposed, would continue forever, exactly as it had been intended. Marthe had watched the Dame de Doubtance repeat Philippa’s name in Francis’s ears when he lay insensate, recovering from the flames. The bitch must have felt smug from beyond the grave to watch them find each other, and damn the costs that Philippa had incurred along the way, or the price that had been paid in their friends and family’s skin, or the death it took to shock Philippa out of her body’s fear.

How could such joy have come freely? But what room was there for regret in such a reward?

If there was indeed an ill-starred bed, it did not belong to Francis Crawford and Philippa Somerville; but that did not mean she had to watch.

-

She had told the ever-suspicious Daniel Hislop she would give the letter to Richard Crawford, her nephew, the staid, sober, and sensible.

Francis would have had Midculter if she had, punishment and reward for his sins. He would have had the shame and agony of his brother, the bastardization of his nieces and nephews, and the mingled opprobrium and redemption of his mother. And if Philippa had kept to her seclusion at Flaw Valleys, Francis would be alone. 

Danny had been wrong, or at least, Danny had not been entirely right. She had resented what Lymond’s family had done, but she had known that it was a blade that would cut all it touched. It would hurt him along with Richard and Sybilla; it would likely hurt her too, for wielding it. She had certainly never expected him to love her for it, although she had wondered if he would understand her motives.

She had thought, perhaps, that it might feel like justice. 

She had told Danny that she would seek out Richard, and she had, but she had left the letter addressed to Francis. Even the omniscience of death could not tell her what path she would have taken, had she been allowed.

Not that it mattered. She had tried to direct the pieces of her life for once, and had found that she was still on the gameboard, everything moving towards that calculated end. She had always been part of a stratagem she could never escape. 

Marthe had never liked dramatic irony. She left Philippa and Francis to their love, which at least one of them deserved; Adam and Philippa’s mother to their quiet rest, after years of strain and concern for others; and Sybilla to her contemplation of the family her husband had given her, and not the family that might have been if the Dame de Doubtance had allowed it.

What would it have been like, to grow up with a sister and brothers, with a hateful father but a loving mother, in a family that was respected? The stars didn’t say. Marthe returned to her body.

-

Jerott buried her by the church, with a name to mark her place and a small audience of those who had met her or simply thought it pitiable, that a woman could die so far from home with so few friends nearby to watch at her wake. Marthe hated them all dispassionately, Jerott and Richard Crawford and this small collection of anonymous Scots. Even the infuriating Danny Hislop showed up, in time for her to hate him too. She had not meant to kill him, and so could not be unhappy that he was not dead; but she did not have to like him.

“Marthe was my wife, and I loved her,” Jerott said simply.

How long would he let himself believe that, Marthe wondered. A month? A year? Would it be a convenient fiction to hold onto for the rest of his life?

“She was not always a comforting woman, or a kind one. But she was one of the most intelligent and passionate women I have ever known. She saved the life of one of my friends, when I did not think there was anything I could do. We had argued before our parting, but she died because she was on our way to me, and I will always regret that I will not know how our days could have ended, if we had been able to end them together.”

Simple and heartfelt, and more poignant than if he’d tried to dress her up in words. It was far from the worst remembrance she could receive. Largely untrue, of course, but much more honest than Marthe had any right to expect.

She watched Danny, but he only listened politely, and clapped Jerott on the shoulder after the last of crowd had wandered off. Sandy-haired, interfering Daniel Hislop, who knew, at least, the beginning of her journey to Scotland — who knew that whatever her true aims, she had no intention of returning to her husband — but seemed to have no intention of enlightening Jerott. 

She did not think it was because he had decided to believe the best of her. A man who wore a mail shirt to a confrontation would not. Danny did not always see as far as Francis and Philippa, but he saw farther than most. 

Far more likely that he had succumbed to the kinder instinct of protecting Jerott. They all had at one point or another, Danny and Francis and Sybilla and even Marthe: everyone with edges sharp enough to pierce behind Jerott’s blunt shields.

Sybilla had thought her unkind to Jerott, but the Crawfords were oft predisposed to judgment. She knew nothing of Marthe and Jerott’s first year of marriage, how Marthe had tried so hard to dull her edges until her very bones felt eroded. In the end she had given up. He should have known her spirit before their vows. If he was surprised afterwards, it was a fault of his own understanding.

Poor Jerott. No two people could have been designed to hurt each other so deeply without intent. They should have known better than to try; but they both had felt more than they thought, after Gabriel, after Volos, after Francis and Güzel had journeyed quietly away from everyone hoping for their return.

But Marthe was dead, and Jerott was free, his starry path finally disentangled from her own. He would not return to trade or their miserable house in France. He might return to Malta, but she thought cooler heads might prevail: or a cooler head, of sandy hair, who might suggest St Mary’s as a nearer and dearer alternative.

She would not be truly missed. Jerott’s future still had its entanglements, some growing stronger by the day. She wondered how long it would take Danny, to move through the things Jerott refused to observe about himself. For Jerott to admit that he had been in love with Francis; that he wanted men’s company not just out of fellowship and enjoyed men’s bodies not just for their fighting skill; that there was a reason he thought of Danny first, when he envisioned his next adventures.

Danny was a bastard and possibly even a kindred spirit, but he he had far more patience than she. She wished him luck of it.

-

The world was well enough without her. Enough, and thriving, full of promise. Marthe did not wish to stay to witness their bliss.

When she tried to return to the earth, it would not have her. Instead she let herself drift up, through the colors of the sky to a blue so dark she thought she might lose herself. With height, infinity grew; the night sky that had filled her vision from the earth was scarcely a portion of the vast empty beauty that surrounded her. Her old friends and enemies the stars were worlds away from what had seemed like close neighbors, familiar patterns distorted and strange with distance.

She had thought they might be cold, but they burned hot and bright in constant motion, so much bigger than anything she had known.

If there was some other world beyond death, she could not find the door, but she did not feel the loss. There was a peaceful lack of judgment here in the center of nothing, watching the stars’ course through the infinite void, the smaller planets and rocks that circled them without end. She had lost sight of which small, burning sun was her own.

Perhaps Camilla de Doubtance was wrong, perhaps Nostradamus was wrong, perhaps John Dee was wrong, perhaps Marthe had been wrong: perhaps the stars did not wink their knowledge of human life, did not care about the fate of anyone so small and short-lived and desperately far away. Perhaps there was no pattern to read there at all.

Perhaps the Dame de Doubtance had meddled with lives and marriages out of sheer hubris, and it was only the combined weight of coincidence and expectations and luck and human nature that the brilliant hero she wanted even came to be. 

Perhaps Francis Crawford was just a man. Perhaps Marthe simply couldn’t die.

\- 

A pull brought her back to her body: in it, not near it, enough to feel the vague and slow stirring of her blood and the weight of the soil that dusted her cheeks and arms, so light and warm after the emptiness of the heavens.

She opened her eyes, and felt her heart beat.

“I would have buried you where the trees turn wild, or scattered your ashes across the sea,” Güzel said.

She wore a simple traveling dress, stained with earth. Her face and nails were unpainted, her hair only loosely bound. She had always been the most beautiful woman Marthe had ever known.

Marthe had to cough before she could speak, exhaling mud and death-dust, and wiped off her face with the edge of her shroud. “What hell is this?”

“It is life,” Güzel said. “For some I suppose they are the same.”

They were not in the churchyard, but the church’s peak was in sight, beyond the trees and the curve of the river. Marthe lay entangled in her shroud, wearing the clothes in which she had been buried, and not the clothes in which she had died.

“Austin Grey shot me in the heart and in the head,” Marthe said. “That does not seem much like life. You died in Russia, at the hands of Vishnevetsky. I see no life there, either.”

“It is not so far away as you would think,” Güzel said, gesturing with one long, bare hand. “Baida… He was not a temperate man, but neither was he a subtle one. There are arts to seeming dead, when one does not want to be found.”

“But mine was not simply seeming,” Marthe said.

Güzel shook her head slowly. “No. You required a different sort of art. The Dame de Doubtance knew the method of it.”

For the first time, Marthe thought to unbutton her burial gown, to see where the bullet had entered. There was no wound; instead a silvered scar spread across her chest, tendrils creeping towards her breastbone and shoulder. She felt no pain.

“Returning you without scarring was beyond my abilities,” Güzel added, her eyes not on Marthe’s chest but just beyond her eyes. She sounded almost hesitant, for the first time in all their long acquaintance, and that more than anything was what prompted Marthe to raise a tentative hand to her face. “You are intact, and the scar is not so noticeable as it could be. But you will not look the same.”

Marthe let her hand drop. “I will not be mistaken for my brother now,” she murmured, and Güzel inclined her head. Marthe looked at her hands and considered this, and then she glanced up and asked, as sharply as she could, “So what good am I now, then?”

“Pardon me?”

“What task is mine next? What errand am I to be sent on? Should I endure another voyage across continents with men I cannot abide? Will you need me to die again in a year’s time, to save my brother from some new enemy? How am I now to be used, that you would bring me back?”

“I brought you back for none of those reasons,” Güzel said. She knelt just out of reach, heedless of the dirt on her worn dress. Marthe ached to be nearer, and did not move.

“No? It wasn’t fated that you feign your death, and keep such secrecy that even your friends had no inkling? The stars didn’t tell you to try your hand at a technique that my grandmother was only willing to use once, on her chosen hero?”

“No,” Güzel said.

“Then _why did you bring me back_?” Marthe snarled.

“You asked twice why I continued to return to you, despite kings and princes waiting at my call. You asked once if I would discard fate and be with you somewhere the stars could not control us,” Güzel said simply. “I did not answer you then.”

Marthe curled her fingers so tightly into the shroud that her fingernails cut into her palms, even through the linen. “You wish me to believe that you pulled me back from death because you _love_ me?”

“Marthe,” Güzel said. Her eyes were deep and true, so black that Marthe thought she could almost watch the heavens spin once more.

Marthe looked into the trees, their trunks strong and independent, their roots tangled together. “Tell me one thing only, if thou canst,” she said from memory, after years of hiding in corners of the abbey to read the letters of a woman who had spoken with more frankness and self-possession than a young girl could have imagined in the world, “why, after our conversion — which thou alone didst decree — I am fallen into such neglect and oblivion with thee that I am neither refreshed by thy speech and presence nor comforted by a letter in thine absence.”

“The ardour of desire, rather than love?” Güzel murmured. She still did not reach out. “I have desired many, Marthe, and when they have died I have let them die. I might have let myself die at Baida’s hand, if that had been all there was. Fate does not need you alive, Marthe. I do.”

“You left me!” Marthe cried, too loud for the quiet woods and the peaceful brook. “You left. Because my brother’s fate is so great that it eats everything around it.”

“Yes. I did,” Güzel said. “I cannot apologize for following the path I saw before me, or for playing my role in the course of human history. We all gather our power where we can, as women. You know this.”

Marthe forced her hands to to unclench, releasing the shroud that still wrapped her and letting it slide to the ground. “So go find him, if he will go. He is only in Flaw Valleys. Will you bring Philippa, or will you leave her behind as well?”

“Neither,” Güzel said. “Francis Crawford has no need of me now, and I have no need of him.”

Marthe scoffed. “He would not have you, you mean. Not anymore. Will you miss him in your bed? They say in France he is unparalleled. Or will you find another man and fuck him into greatness?”

“Marthe,” Güzel said again, her dark brows stern and still.

“No, speak frankly,” Marthe said, with acid. “Anything you can say I have already told myself a hundred times over. You are a woman who likes to put men in power, and I am a woman who will never have power. What interest could I be to you?”

“This is true,” Güzel said calmly. “I would not collect you as I did your brother. You are a woman, and I work only with men. You are an orphan and a bastard, and though your father is esteemed, your connection to him will never be publicly known. You hold no position of influence. You inherited nothing of your own. To the world at large, you are not even alive. I would never have added you to my collection.” 

She knelt closer. Marthe, sick to her stomach and flushed with petty fires, refused to turn away no matter how tempting the idea.

Güzel laid her hand softly on Marthe’s shoulder. “Knowing all that,” she said, “what does it mean that I am still here?”

“Why would I know?” asked Marthe, her voice hoarse and not so scornful as she might have wished.

“You are free, Marthe,” Güzel said. “Your path is your own. You can do whatever you wish.”

Marthe watched her, and tried to comprehend freedom. No more edicts from the Dame de Doubtance, trying to fill a dead woman’s shoes, finding that all her choices were not her choices at all. 

“You can go where you wish,” Güzel said. “But I would be honored if you would let us go together.”

“Somewhere the stars cannot control us?” Marthe murmured, and Güzel’s beautiful lips curved into a smile.

“Even that.”

“You may hate me, in a month.”

“And you may hate me. But I would like for us to find out on our own.”

She had never truly let herself envision it before, even the single time she had been desperate enough, had been heartsick enough, to ask. Some part of her had known, after all, what the answer would be. It had been a mere fantasy, unreal in its simplicity. Now Marthe let herself fully consider it, layering the shadows and highlights of truth into the bare outline. They could find lodgings somewhere peaceful and private; Marthe’s bank accounts all belonged to Jerott now, but she had troves scattered in places he didn't know to look, and she suspected Güzel was the same. They would still need to find some employment, without Marthe’s merchant business or Dragut’s coffers to rely on, and that might create its own troubles: for who would employ two dead women? And what employment could they find, as two lone women, that would be satisfying enough not to leave Marthe nostalgic for the banal, chafing days of being the respectable and prosperous Marthe Blyth?

But wherever they went, they would find artists and scholars, women and men of fierce passions and constant thought. She had found such kindred spirits even in France as Mrs. Blyth, and Güzel seemed to attract fascinating people wherever she went.

Mikal would show up, undoubtedly. He seemed the sort to simply know, and turn up without warning but with new poetry.

Marthe would be by turns besotted and bitter, and sometimes both all at once, and more besides. Besotted, to at last be with the woman she loved with no one else hanging insubstantially between them. Bitter to be nigh-alone in the world once more, to have had her choice taken by two shots, to never know what might have happened if Austin Grey had not hated her brother. But then, why not go all the way back? If she had not gotten on that boat. If Güzel had run away with her when she first suggested it. If she had never dragged her brother’s destiny behind her, constant as a shadow, bright as the sun, heavy and all-encompassing as the sea.

Would it be unmooring, to live in the world without knowing the steps that were expected of her? Or would she be glad, even in a month, even in a year, to have all the consequences be her own?

They could travel, even as two unescorted women; Marthe had done it before. Marthe could playact as a Spanish noblewoman, or a Frenchman, or whatever suited her fancy for whatever they set their hands at. And perhaps — if Marthe needed help, she would let herself ask, and Güzel would help her; and if Güzel needed aid or rescue, Marthe would provide it, simply because she needed it.

Slowly, but with intent, Marthe placed her hand over Güzel’s. “This is the first time I have visited Scotland,” she said. Güzel watched her closely. “I do not think I will feel any need to return for a long while.”

Güzel smiling outstripped any other expression Marthe had seen on her yet. “No?”

“Let us go someplace neither of us have any claim to, and nobody recognises either of us, and see if we hate one another in a month.”

“Yes,” Güzel said, and bent her head towards Marthe for a kiss. “I think we can manage that very well.”

**Author's Note:**

> In my head, they run into Francis and Philippa two years or so down the line, and all of them are dressed as other people. Philippa is delighted.
> 
> Thanks so much for giving me a reason to write Marthe the fix-it fic I needed. <3
> 
>  
> 
> References:
> 
> Title and some lines of dialogue, of course, from the series itself.
> 
> “Marley was dead: to begin with,” shamelessly appropriated from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which in my defense is also a story about ghosts and second chances.
> 
> As a child, Marthe imagines herself into the story of Joan of Arc as well as two stories from the high medieval period. Le Roman de Silence is about a child who’s born female being raised as a boy for various literary reasons, with various pronoun changes through the book; Nature and Nurture literally show up throughout the book to argue about whether Silence should be a boy or a girl, to mixed results. Eventually Silence has to become Silentia and start dressing as a woman, which I imagine Marthe would have found as frustrating as I did during medieval lit class. Lanval is one of the Lais of Marie de France, about a foreign knight of King Arthur — who was brave and generous but the only knight who didn’t get any gifts from Arthur, what a dick — who falls in love with a fairy lady but isn’t supposed to speak of it. Of course trouble ensues and he does, and then thinks he’s lost her until she shows up to prove him innocent and take him to Avalon, never to be heard from again. 
> 
> “I preferred love to wedlock, freedom to a bond. … that a perfect love should preserve their bond of matrimony unbroken, not so much by the continence of their bodies as by the purity of their hearts,” along with “the ill-starred bed”: Héloïse to Abelard, letter one, talking about why marriage usually sucks. What a badass.
> 
> “For when ye have understood this, that there is not a better man nor a happier woman on the face of the earth…” - Héloïse, quoting Aspasia (possibly a very wise ancient Greek courtesan? my very scanty research was inconclusive) as described by Aeschines, one of Socrates’ students. I liked this phrasing better than the other translation I found, although it's a little more ambiguous. The anecdote is about Aspasia and Aeschines talking to a man named Xenophon and his wife (who apparently doesn’t deserve a name, smh) about how they’ll always wish for better things than they have, including their spouse, because of course they can't contrive to marry the very best wife or best husband. Francis and Philippa will obviously never have this problem; can you imagine either of them thinking that anyone else in the world would be a better spouse? Me neither.
> 
> “Tell me one thing only, if thou canst, why, after our conversion, which thou alone didst decree, I am fallen into such neglect and oblivion with thee that I am neither refreshed by thy speech and presence nor comforted by a letter in thine absence.” & “The ardour of desire, rather than love” — Héloïse to Abelard, letter one. That entire paragraph could be paraphrased much less eloquently as “stop fucking ignoring me, you dick; I feel like you only wanted me for sex, and the worst part is that everyone else thinks so too.” I’d never read any of Héloïse’s letters before I started researching for this fic, but she seemed like the type of woman Marthe would have appreciated, and this part in particular struck a chord — feeling vile and abandoned while her love is picked over by others, not even able to convince herself that any of it was real.
> 
> (But I'm writing this story, of course, and I get to say that it was, and that she'll go off and have adventures of her own and be able to actually smile when she and Güzel inevitably run into Francis and Philippa.)


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